Exports in the first six months fell by 10.1 percent year-on-year to 27.61 billion dollars, while imports totalled 29.72 billion dollars, down by 34.1 percent, the General Statistics Office (GSO) said in a preliminary report.

For the month of June alone, Vietnam booked an estimated trade deficit of 1.2 billion dollars.

The country's trade deficit hit a record of 17 billion dollars in 2008.

In the six-month period, Vietnam - a low-income but booming economy where the gross domestic product grew by 6.18 percent last year - spent 2.12 billion dollars on steel imports, down more than half compared with the same period last year.

Vietnam's year-on-year imports of machinery and equipment were down by nearly a fifth to 5.34 billion dollars, while fertiliser imports fell a third to 710 million dollars.

The country earned 4.07 billion dollars from exports of garments and textiles, and 1.09 billion dollars from coffee, down by 12.2 percent.

Vietnam, the world's number two rice exporter, increased its exports of the grain by nearly a quarter to 1.8 billion dollars.

Between January and June, the Southeast Asian nation - which has sizeable offshore oil reserves in the South China Sea - saw crude oil export revenues fall 41.5 percent to 3.3 billion dollars.

During that period, Vietnam saw industrial production rise to 18.5 billion dollars, up by 4.8 percent year-on-year, said the GSO.

The non-state sector reported an increase of 7.6 percent, followed by the foreign invested sector with 4.5 percent. The state-owned sector recorded only an 1.5 percent increase in output.

Agence France Presse - June 25, 2009